Have you ever read one of those books that puts a language to a whole realm of “things you knew to be true” but could never really put in a nutshell so that you could share them with everyone else? Two books top that list for me; “Pure Instinct” by Kathy Kolbe and “The Go-Giver” by Bob Burg and John David Mann. Anyone who knows me knows about those two books, they’ve been that impactful in my life. So when I read the blog post by Bob Burg “Go-Getters are Also Good” explaining that the opposite of a go-giver” isn’t a “go-getter” but a “go-taker” a light went on. But you know, living in a world overwhelmed with “go-takers” can make it tough to convert to being a “go-giver”. I recently connected a well seasoned, highly knowledgeable, business consultant with a young cinematographer. This young man has loads of talent, a real passion for what he does and an impressive body of work and I felt he was ready to hear some feedback on his business strategy. So after their first lunch together I asked the young man how it went. He said he thought he’d done something to upset the consultant but didn’t know what. We talked for a bit and finally I asked him, “Does it make you suspicious when you can’t figure out the other person’s agenda?” His answer? “Well, yeah,” delivered in the tone we usually use when we say “Well, duh!” So I asked him, “Do you think you might have upset him because you didn’t trust him?” Brief pause then the light went...

I sat there in my car, facing West on I-70 looking at the tail end of a semi trailer in front of me and the grill of another one in my rear view mirror, moving about an inch per second. Not an auspicious beginning to what would now be an even longer than usual trip to see a client of 12 years who, if he and his team weren’t such a joy to coach, I would have dropped long ago just to avoid this very kind of situation. This required more than music to distract me, it was either return some calls or tune in to NPR. Too frustrated with my current traffic dilemma to return calls – let’s see what NPR has going on. I came into the middle of an interview about happiness. As in “are you happy?” and “how happy are you?” But also as in “why are people in their 40’s and 50’s so unhappy?” and “is there a limit to how happy you can be?” Huh? Yup, turns out that there are studies that indicate that people are more likely to suffer depression in their middle years. And other studies suggest that we all have a “happiness set point” that determines how predisposed we are to being happy and just how much “happy” we are able to sustain. Since I know that success in coaching means tapping into that “happy” that they were discussing and many of my clients are, like myself, in the age range they were saying is less likely to be able to tap into that “happy”, I “happily” listened to...